Canary's Songbook

By Karen Press

The power of history to shape people and politics is explored in this collection of finely wrought poems. The desire to find ancestors who can be invoked as sources of wisdom, or remembered as examples of imprudence, is a central preoccupation of these poems that are given additional potency because of South Africa's painful dialogue with its own past. While the poems dwell on South Africa's need to recover and learn from its history, they are also an affirmation of the universality of this theme that places South Africa within a global culture in which countries and their citizens struggle to forge whole identities from the fragments of history they inherit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781847778031

Book preview

KAREN PRESS

The Canary’s Songbook

Acknowledgements

For offering me tranquil space in which to work on the poems in this collection, I am grateful to Anne von der Heiden and Hans-Hagen Hildebrandt in Sompriezzo, Max and Delayne Loppert in Refrontolo, Carola Luther in Sowerby Bridge and Brendan and Ann Butler in Edinburgh. I thank the Rockefeller Foundation for the residency they granted me at the Bellagio Study and Conference Centre in 2002, during which a substantial part of the preparation of the collection was undertaken.

Versions of some of the poems in this volume first appeared in Carapace, New Coin, PN Review and on the website www.poetryinternational.org.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

The sea roaring softly

I

Broken bits of the past

Knocking series

That house

When you’re older you’ll understand

Séance

Shrines

Treasure trail

Stones for my pockets

The poem each woman poet writes

Men wear the secret masks

Living children and dead children

II

In Jakob’s house

III

Ox blood poisons the ground with longing

Visiting home

He can’t explain

Outside and inside the temple

Corruption – a lexicon

Evolution: details

How her mother prepared her

Engineers of dreams

IV

In the cradle of humankind

Every revolution begins in the streets

Tannie Lettie plays the guitar

Prometheus resigns from the Party

Only a good man

The personal assistant

Redistributing it

Preparing to govern

Oral tradition

Shopping

Stop child abuse

Wind parted the buildings

Three-stringed necklace

So very sick

Triptych

Flakes of the light falling

V

Book

VI

It seems that if you write

This other place

In doorways

Between them

In my sleep

The hurting pillow

Cured

VII

Walking songs for Africans abroad

Everywhere in the Duomo

Globalisation 1

Globalisation 2

Letters to the president

Distantly heard signals

Aching

Collioure, September 2001

Soft

Apprehension, north

A certain history

Wednesday morning in the Café Caprice

He is often mentioned in books

Reaching Siran

Translation rights

Ends that hang over the lake

The work the poets do

The canary’s songbook

About the Author

Also by Karen Press from Carcanet

Copyright

The sea roaring softly

The sea roaring softly

and a plane flying over it

roaring into the distance.

The tide so far out

the rock pools become rolling hills,

brown grass and green grass, curling.

Springtime of the world

when the sun shone

gently on shallow water.

Softly something crashes

far away, like a child’s cough

when its mother is near.

I

Broken bits of the past

Broken bits of the past

find their way into my pockets

bright as the eyes of stray dogs,

pleading and fierce.

In sympathy the present hammers itself to pieces

and climbs in there.

Cement – we need cement now,

wood glue, paper glue, fixatives, bonding agents,

they should issue all schoolchildren with enough,

send them back to the land

to cement it in place, cement down their parents,

make plaster casts of bones to bury there as ancestors,

order indigenous trees from catalogues

and plant them everywhere to stabilise the sand,

bury the smashed masks and pots

deep in the ground to keep it drained,

feed the dogs and